Luminarium by Alex Shakar

he’d stood at the back of the room by the door while Fred and their parents had hovered over George, talking to him, holding his hands. Sam had remained for a few minutes, a halfhour at most, then, mumbling that he had to go, turned and slid away. Later, he’d explained himself by saying there wasn’t anything he could do there, and that someone needed to be minding the business. Which Fred couldn’t fully argue with; but then Sam had never returned, and the last time Vartan and Holly had gotten to see him was when they themselves had stopped by the office a couple months ago to say hello. Fred had the distinct impression Sam was counting the days, biding his time until he could put a thousand miles between himself and the rest of them. Sam’s recent advice to their dad about all of them moving down there, Fred viewed as nothing more than a halfhearted sop to his guilt. The absolute least he could do.
    “I don’t know,” Fred said. “Maybe I just have trouble picturing you in Bermuda shorts.”
    “I’ll get some black ones.”
    They risked a look at each other, despite themselves, almost smiling. And suddenly it was happening again. The expansion. Enveloping the air between them, an unbounded region, more naked than skin. The distance from Sam was dropping away, and mentally Fred pulled back, wheeling some inner arms like he was about to fall from a plane. He didn’t want Sam to be a part of him. He’d sooner have gone out and trailed the next batty old woman on the street. A flicker of fear appeared in Sam’s eyes, perhaps mirroring Fred’s own. Sam turned away, fixing once more on the palm trees on his screen.
    “It’s time to bug out of New York,” he said. “Cities are fucked, long term. We’re all agreed on that.”
    By way of punctuation, he clicked an onscreen button and the Empire State Building began to collapse. At first it seemed to be happening in that all-too-familiar way, a few stories three-quarters of the way up pancaking together like an inchworm gathering itself up for a step. From there, though, the movement took an alien turn: the upper part of the building toppling off at an angle, shearing the lower as it fell, causing entire floors just below the split to slip from their girders and columns like overstewed meat from the bone; then the upper segment exploding on the ground, the mangled stalk still standing in a pile of wreckage.
    “Looks weird, huh?” Sam said. “Empire State Building’s joints are riveted, not just seated, and its columns and beams are fireproofed with brick and cement. Twin Towers just used sheetrock. But the downside to the older construction is it’s way heavier, so when it destabilizes, look out. See, watch.”
    Like a chopped tree, the remaining structure leaned and then came walloping down over the debris.
    Fred felt his throat constricting to the diameter of a coffee stirrer. He fought down the shameful urge to flee the office for the open air.
    “It’s all real physics,” Sam was saying. “Real structural data. The Army Corps of Engineers helped us plug it all in.”
    Real physics was the trademark of the Urth environment, what had early on separated it from all others. Their company hadn’t settled for mere effects in the early days; they’d wanted a completely realistic array of action and reaction—real gravity, acceleration, wind factors, impact warpage, ricochet trajectories. Real physics had been something of an obsession for them, as they had quickly determined that making the experience of Urth more and more real was precisely what made it feel more and more magical. Arguably, it was more verisimilitude than their prototype Urth—an anime-style world of pastoral communes, treehouse villages, and underwater bubble towns among coral reefs—had really needed; and the quest had played a part in fatally delaying their never-to-be commercial launch. Yet subsequently, that same real physics code was the very property that made them valuable to